Is this called happiness?

So my normal and un-normal life continues here in Kona, and I´m getting my own rhythm of life. Getting up three mornings a week to run or walk (half asleep, half dead, pain everywhere!), then settling in at some café to read, while being more on Facebook and e-mail than actually reading.... drinking too much coffee... hitting the beach or pool about once a week so that you actually can see that I live in Hawaii, and not in Norway... On my down time I sit in on DTS classes or go get some more coffee, look at sunsets, watch movies on my tiny Mac Air and read novels - the latest is SYCAMORE ROW by John Grisham and of course the latest from Ken Follett.

It´s a lot of reading. I feel like I read all the time, whether it is newspapers, novels or actual school related books. The book on `Methodology of science´ (Field research methodology) is surprisingly interesting and of course very relevant to me; 3 months before my own field research, my very first one. There´s a lot to think about on beforehand, and a lot that could go wrong, and reading this now, with the authors giving lots of stories about former mistakes, prepares me in a good way, I believe!

The other class I´m taking, like I´ve told before, is called `The history of happiness´, which believe it or not is an academic field.


So is this happiness - this normal and un-normal life I´m living here now? A recent poll showed that the people of Hawaii were the `most happy´ in all the 50 states of America. So... is living here happiness? Adventure, traveling, living abroad, #Hawaiilife, sunny beaches all year around, but at the same time being just like any other normal life - you have to get up to work and eat, the long lines when you least want them, paying bills, plans going wrong and relationships in good and bad times - just like I would anywhere else. What could state whether I lived a happy life or not? Is it determined by my age? Where I live or what I do? Or is it mainly about how I feel? If I feel happy or not? What my emotions are saying at every given time?!

I´ve been reading about the ancient Greeks the last weeks and their perception of happiness, learning that the search for happiness has been a development - even in what happiness is, and just the search itself. It´s not a secret that a lot of human history has thought of being happy as only possible for the gods, or in the afterlife, or for only a chosen few, and therefore haven´t sought happiness the way we see it go crazy in our own age.

Maybe one of the biggest changes from long ago and up to today, is the increasing persistence on our demand to be happy, our right to be happy and our 7-step ways to be happy.

While I ponder all this my life goes on; good days and bad days, happy feelings and sad feelings, missing home and then being excited I live here. Maybe I won´t be able to tell whether I was happy or not until afterwards...? Maybe it´s more about just living now, making the most of it, and determine later what came out of it..?